Born in the bicultural/bilingual setting of El Paso, Texas/Juárez, Chihuahua, attended the University of Texas El Paso, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, & the University of Oregon. Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing & Literature, taught at the University of Oregon, Western State College of Colorado, Central Washington State University, the University of Texas El Paso, and Laney College, Oakland where he founded the Mexican and Latin American Studies Dept.

About Me

Rafael Jesús González, born in the bicultural/bilingual setting of El Paso, Texas/Juárez, Chihuahua, attended the University of Texas El Paso, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, & the University of Oregon. Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing & Literature, he has taught at the University of Oregon, Western State College of Colorado, Central Washington State University, the University of Texas at El Paso, and Laney College, Oakland (where he founded the Mexican and Latin American Studies Dept.)
He has thrice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He was Poet in Residence at the Oakland Museum of California and the Oakland Public Library under the Poets & Writers “Writers on Site” award in 1996. He served as contributing editor for The Montserrat Review and received the Annual Dragonfly Press Award for Literary Achievement in 2002. In 2003 he was honored by the National Council of Teachers of English & Annenberg/CPB for his writing. In June 2007, he was honored for excellence in poetry at the 20th World Congress of Poets, Montgomery, Alabama.

Saturday, December 31, 2016

I have holed-up this holiday
Season, under-cover if you will, literally. I wake up late, pull the covers
over my head and sleep some more, wake again and pick up the book beside me and
often get out of bed at 11:00, sometimes 12:00 or 1:00, even 2:00. (I have read
Woodard's American Nations,
Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous Peoples'
History of the United States, Best
American Short Stories 2007 picked by Stephen King, Gatto's Dumbing Us Down — not cheerful reading
but enlightening.) I lie watching the rainbows thrown by the prisms hanging in
my windows across the thangka of the Green Tara and the Huichol yarn paintings
in my room. I am sleepy all the time.

This reluctance to crawl from
under the covers I blame on the dark, the cold (even on clear days), my years.
But I know that it is the coldness in my chest, the knot in my gut, anxiety, fear,
not-quite-despair that immobilizes me. The year finishes badly; the new one
promises much pain.

A child never-grown-up has been
selected to head the nation, not one "spoiled" by pampering which at
least connotes a doting love, but a brat made rotten by little love and too
much privilege, narcissistic beyond imagining, willful, demanding, petulant,
angry, prone to tantrums if he does not get his way. Shall I repeat the litany
of his faults — his misogyny, his racism, his homophobia, his bigotry, his
profound ignorance? His analysis, his description, his judgment of anything
does not go beyond stock superlatives; he knows nothing of ideas, much less
policy, not an iota of science. "I am a business man," he says
proudly as if that justified all his conniving, his dishonesty, his thievery.
Should we doubt it, he has his billions to prove it. So the empire now gets its
own, homegrown Caligula. Sociopathic megalomaniac, he too may come to declare
himself divine. True, we have been governed by criminals before (can one govern
an empire and not be criminal?), but this is a case apart.

It is the cruelty I fear, the
utter heartlessness in the face of suffering, the willingness, nay, the intent
to cause suffering and pain. Nor compassion nor justice is a hallmark of the
1%, the Republican Party he represents and that brought him to power. (Being a
Democrat is no guarantee of decency, but it seems that a decent Republican is
an oxymoron.) With Republican control of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the
Executive (the proposed Cabinet reads like a Hitlerian wish-list), full-fledged
U. S. fascism has come, a fascism prepared to destroy the Earth itself for the
sake of wealth and power. Can it be called anything but madness?

I suspect that most of you reading
this are too young to remember the century past German fascism and Hitler (whom
the U.S. president elect resembles in character and action), the unspeakable
suffering, destruction, death. I fear the suppression of inquiry, information,
and expression, that what I write may be cause for my arrest, imprisonment,
torture, death. Under the rubric of "terrorism" any act of opposition
to the state can be a crime while terror itself is the policy of the state. In
the hands of the Republicans, the Constitution could be altered, the Bill of
Rights nullified, civil liberties cancelled. I fear the trump, trump, trump of
military boots in the street outside my door.

What could you, my fellow citizens
who voted for Donald T., possibly have been thinking? He hid nothing, not his
arrogance, not his violence, not his disregard of common decency. He appeared
before us naked in all his nastiness obligating the opposition to respond to
his outrageous boorishness and lies leaving untouched matters of governance and
policy of which he is completely ignorant. It pains me that in spite of the
many explanations and excuses bandied about, I seem to have but little choice
than to consider you, my brothers and sisters, either scoundrels or fools. What
in him called out to you? I dread the answer. (And you who could have but did
not vote?)

It is perhaps that part of us that
I dread most, those of us who will rally to his standards of violence and hate.
And just as much those of us who will quietly acquiesce, glad for the job,
routinely signing the papers that will tear families apart as the families of
slaves were torn at the beginning of the nation; those of us who will make the
arrest and turn the key, apply the cattle-prod because "it is our job;"
those of us who will make evil banal and routine because we have families to
support and our lives are ruled by fear. And we will learn to become blind to
the suffering of others. Imagine.

Democracy once lost is very hard
to restore. Our resistance must be immediate and overwhelming, our love fierce,
our joy protected. Our homes, our neighborhoods, our cities must be made
bulwarks of justice, of refuge. Our schools sanctuary of freedom of thought and
inquiry, our churches voices for justice rooted in compassion. Much is demanded
of us and great may be the sacrifice, but if we all share it, it will be much,
much less. Let us then take to the streets and public places dressed in our
most joyful colors, making music with our drums and flutes, dragging our pianos
out our doors if we must, dancing, singing, chanting, turning all our art into
protest and celebration — and make our spaces truly our own.

Not only have the wrong answers
but the wrong questions been forced upon us. We should stop asking not what can
we do for "our" country (that meaningless abstraction that has come
to mean the state demanding we work to keep the greatest army in the world in
constant war to protect "our" interests, meaning those of the 1%
filthy rich who are the state) but, if the country is truly us and ours, we
must ask, nay demand, of a government that is us and ours, that it do for us
who are homeless, for us who cannot afford to live where we work and our
communities are, for us who have no medicine when we are ill, for us who have
no education and our curiosity starved, for us who have no meaningful work
because either machines do it in our stead or work is taken where slave wages
can be imposed, for the holy Earth that births and sustains us. Unless we do
this, forget the nonsense of making 'America Great Again." 'America, the
U.S. of A, may be mighty but until it is just it will never be great.

So as 2016 comes to a bitter end
and the new year, popularly depicted as a baby in diapers, ominously crawls in,
I will bid the old year goodbye and bring in the new in vigil and ceremony with
bitter sacred medicine to sweeten the heart. And in my cedar and sage scented
prayers I will invoke Lord Ganesh that he may with his dance do away with the
great obstacles to our democracy, freedoms, justice, peace, the wholeness of
the Earth itself, and make our way as smooth and painless as his mercy allows.
To you I send blessings hoping that we meet in our streets and public places
making joyful noise for the sake of life.

The goat, hirsute hide,-----horns of turquoise-----garnet eyes,-----hoofs of lead,kneels to Saturn,planet of rings,in the long night---and perseveres, persists---in his desire to gorethe cardinal point of the earth.

The immense wailing moon
looks for her children in the rubble
of the burned ghost ship,
ghost ship of fancies,
of daydreams, of visions
of the young artists
who had nowhere
to live & create
but in the ghost ship
sails of flames.
What did Lord Shiva
intend to purify
with this sacrifice of innocents?
The hellish economics of empire,

the greed that allowed them
only this lodging in the ghost ship?
What expiation is required?
The moon looks for her children
of the burned ghost ship

Tonantzin-------mother of all-------that of you lives,be, dwells, inhabits, is;Mother of all the gods-----------------the goddessesMother of us all,---------the cloud & the sea---------the sand & the mountain---------the moss & the tree---------the mite & the whale.

Spilling flowersmake of my cloak a reminderthat we never forget that you arethe only paradise of our living.

Blessed are you,cradle of life, grave of death,fount of delight, rock of pain.